The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Cresting the rise, I passed a sprawling shantytown set among the burned-out trees; a tarpaper, plywood, and tin encampment in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. I doubled back, realizing I’d overshot my turnoff, and this time I found what I was looking for: a large metal gate that opened onto a dirt driveway. Jean Pierre Arabonis had seen my car go by the first time and he stood out front, waiting. Opening the gate, he waved me in. I rolled up the driveway and stopped in front of his office, a smallish, low-ceilinged structure made of buff-colored stone. A fifty-foot tower stood next to it, the steel latticework climbing toward a wooden platform that held an enormous satellite receiving dish, pointed toward the heavens.

  Here, in this unlikely place, was the headquarters of Arabonis’s company, Ocean Satellite Imaging Systems (OSIS). A compact, thirty-seven-year-old South African of Belgian descent, Arabonis was a maritime meteorologist who was in great demand for his eerily accurate wave, ocean, and weather forecasts. He had clients all over the world—fishing fleets, shipping companies, government agencies, marine salvagers—but he specialized in South Africa’s complex waters. When other forecasters were zigging, Arabonis often zagged, and when he was proven right time after time, his reputation grew.

  We shook hands and he showed me into the office, where another meteorologist, Mark Stonestreet, sat at a computer, a nautical chart unfurled beside him. I had come to meet Arabonis because I’d heard that he understood the Agulhas Current’s freak waves better than anyone; that, in fact, he released warnings when they were likely to appear so that ships could rethink their routes. Once in 1995 Arabonis had forecast one-hundred-foot waves in the Transkei (near East London) with such precision that Sloane had been able to fly a tow surfer named Jason Ribbink into the Agulhas by helicopter, then winch him, his driver, and their Jet Ski into exact position to surf the current at peak fury.

  “I was busy with this job,” Sloane told me, recounting the incident. “We had the Kiperousa, a Greek bulk carrier, grounded on the beach. Heavy surf; she was in danger of breaking up. So I was keeping in touch with Jean Pierre about what the weather was doing. He said: ‘There are going to be some really abnormal waves offshore.’ Well, then about an hour later Jason called to say he was planning to surf the big waves at Dungeons, you know, near Hout Bay. I said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be there—you should be up the Transkei coast! JP says it’s gonna be a hundred feet.’ ”

  Ribbink and his tow partner, Dane Patterson, took him up on the tip, driving north. They met up with Sloane, and in East London a safety diver joined the group. Curious more than anything, Sloane strapped their Jet Ski beneath the helicopter and lit out over the Indian Ocean with the entire crew. “We flew past a couple ships,” Sloane recalled. “There’s nothing out there, and here we are with a Jet Ski dangling. They called us up and said, ‘Where the hell are you guys going?’ I said, ‘Oh, just heading out for a little surfing!’ ” He laughed. “Basically, what we did that day was break all these aviation rules. I was glad it never hit the press.”

  Thirty miles offshore they arrived at Arabonis’s appointed place, an area where the storm energy met a forceful swirl in the current. “We released the Jet Ski from the helicopter and the driver jumped into the water,” Sloane said. “When he was ready, Jason jumped out with his surfboard.” In that specific spot, Arabonis had told them, “you’ll have a two-hour window for one-hundred-foot waves.”

  He was right.

  “Oh yeah, they got some,” Sloane confirmed, raising his eyebrows for emphasis. Unfortunately, viewed from the air, the waves didn’t look nearly as awe-inspiring as they actually were; photographs couldn’t capture the spectacle. In the open ocean a swell doesn’t break the way it does on a reef or a seamount. You don’t get the fearsome curling lip or the horrifying hang time as the wave winds up to release its energy in one knockout punch. Offshore in the Agulhas the waves bucked and rolled and tossed their weight around all right, at enormous heights and with terrible power, but they resembled endless ramps more than steep cliffs. “These waves have a huge long wavelength so they don’t look like a heck of a lot,” Arabonis said. “And you can’t see them as well when the whole area is rough—on that day a forty- or fifty-knot wind was blowing.”

  Thumbing through a map drawer for a chart of the current, Arabonis kept talking. “I don’t work by hard-and-fast rules,” he explained. “I work pretty much on gut feel, and on what I’ve seen happen before.” When his inner one-hundred-foot-wave alarm bells sounded, two simple things had usually set them off: “Southwesterly swell [at an interval of] more than fourteen seconds, and seas more than fifteen feet high.” If those two variables were present, then the ruckus could potentially begin. But the abnormal waves themselves, should they appear, defied any kind of neat explanation.

  “This is where all the wave mechanics start becoming a little fuzzy,” Arabonis said. A perplexed look crossed his face at the impossibility of knowing every last wave secret. “These freaks …,” he said, drawing out the words and then beginning the thought anew. “Well, it’s not oceanographers looking at them anymore. It’s physicists! Because they’ve discovered that these waves are behaving in a manner that is similar to light waves. They can suck the energy from both sides and concentrate it in one spot. And light waves are partially particles and partially wavelike. It’s moving [the study of waves] into a whole different dimension.”

  In this alternate universe of ocean behavior, individual waves in the Agulhas somehow reached a tipping point where (once Arabonis’s two basic requirements had been met) a third (usually unknown) element entered the picture and upended the whole equation. Suddenly things went nonlinear. They went off the charts, off the radar, off the neatly plotted curves of statistical wave-height distribution, and into the shadowy, destructive territory that the Agulhas Current shared with the Bermuda Triangle, where things—enormous things like supertankers and awfully big things like cruise ships and smaller-but-still-hard-to-misplace things like eighty-foot yachts—disappeared into the maw.

  I told Arabonis I’d read the statistic that, on average, two large ships a week go missing in the global seas. “The figure I heard was that one bulk carrier a week was disappearing,” he replied, with a rush of explanation. “Iron-ore carriers. Those things are death traps. They’re built to poor specification, a lot of them are quite old, and they lie very low in the water. The waves generally break the first and second hatch covers. Once you breach those, two things can happen: the bulkheads collapse, or the vessel starts taking a nose-down attitude. It just floods from stem to stern and powers itself to the bottom. It can sink in approximately one minute.”

  As he outlined this harsh fate he turned to a blackboard and brusquely diagrammed the scenario, his chalk snapping as he sketched the outlines of the doomed bulker. He stepped back to examine his drawing. “We’ll likely see more incidents like this as the price of commodities—and the demand—remains high. The older ships are remaining in service. Normally a bulk carrier, after twenty years she needs to be broken up. But now there are many rust buckets still plying their trade after twenty-five, twenty-seven years. They get a third-world crew and a captain who’s two warnings away from losing his ticket. They should have been off the seas long ago.”

  A strong wind gusted past, rattling the windows. It was a raw day to start, but it felt even more so when considered from up here, at what seemed like the end of the world. Five miles south, the cape jutted into the South Atlantic; after that, next stop: Antarctica. But Arabonis didn’t mind the isolation. In fact, he needed it for his satellite reception. He did mind living next door to a squatter camp, though, and over the years he had defended his home, his family, his office, his computers, his electronic equipment, and his dog from armed attacks, attempted home invasions, and glue-sniffing, knife-waving intruders. The scorched landscape, he told me, was the result of arson.

  But the same things that had drawn Arabonis to his profession made South Africa an ideal home. Along with his marine-base
d career, he led a richly aquatic life. He was a licensed yacht master, an experienced sailor, a Class IV commercial diver, and a scuba instructor with more than two thousand dives under his belt. To hear Arabonis describe his undersea excursions is to learn that these waters did not lack for sharks. For instance, at nearby Pyramid Rock, only three hundred yards off a beach near Simon’s Town, Arabonis regularly encountered clusters of them. “I’ve seen three great whites,” he said. “All three were quite scary.” He also ran into spotted seven-gill cow sharks, a creature whose mellow-sounding name belied its aggressive personality. “These things are not to be fooled with,” he cautioned, as though I were planning to head down there right now for a dip.

  Only a few weeks before my visit, all of Arabonis’s interests had collided in a single, bizarre tragedy, an accident involving a giant wave, a boat, and a group that was diving with great white sharks, a stone’s throw up the coast at Dyer Island. The thirty-five-foot catamaran, owned by the cage-diving operator Shark Team, had motored out on the fateful morning carrying ten divers and a nine-person crew. Conditions bordered on crummy, with a seven-foot southwest swell buffeted by a ten-knot southeast wind under cement-colored skies. Wads of kelp floated on the surface, borne on the swell. As they dropped anchor in an area known as Shark Alley, the chumming began, and some great whites had already been sighted circling at ten-fifteen when, as one diver described it later, “this huge wave blacked out the sky.”

  The wave picked the catamaran up like a piece of lint and tossed it (with its attached dive cages) upside down, throwing some people clear but pinning most beneath the hull. Several boats that had been anchored nearby raced over to pull the struggling divers from the sharky waters, but not everyone was saved. Three people were drowned, knocked unconscious by the impact or tangled in the boat’s ropes; six more were seriously injured.

  In the aftermath, and with so many eyewitnesses, one thing became certain: the wave had been at least three times the size of the surrounding seas. “I’ve never seen anything like that wave,” an onlooker said. “Nothing would have stood a chance, except maybe an ocean liner.” “Without a shadow of a doubt it was a freak or rogue wave,” said a National Sea and Rescue Institute spokesman. “You have to be humble in the ocean. It’s a place where the unknown happens.”

  To chalk up the accident to nature’s mysteries, however, did not suffice for insurance companies, who in turn hired Arabonis to find out what exactly had happened out there. Arabonis hated forensic jobs—he was often called upon to help locate missing yachts, situations that usually came with unhappy endings—but he duly produced a forty-two-page report about the day: the sea state, weather, bathymetry, tides, water depth, even the moon phase. The wave, he concluded, had been about twenty feet high, and despite popular opinion, Arabonis believed there was nothing too murky about it. This was simply a once-in-a-blue-moon wave, a much bigger animal that shrieked out of the background at long intervals, rare but explainable ocean behavior. “Small boats get into trouble in big waves,” he said.

  So what causes a garden-variety six-foot wave to grow to such an extent that it can start flipping boats? After examining charts and photographs of how the seas were breaking that day, Arabonis concluded that a shoal near Shark Alley had focused the wave energy, the way a magnifying glass can amplify light energy if held in just the right position. “When the waves bunch up, then you’re going to get the odd big one,” he said. “But what is happening, I’m almost one hundred percent certain, is that every now and then, the bottom features are sufficient for it to bunch up plus focus at one point. That’s your little tie-breaker. That’s what pushes it over the edge so you get your one-in-a-thousand wave.”

  This same phenomenon could be scaled up and exported into the Agulhas, where waves could snap tankers in half. “I suspect the discontinuities in the [continental] shelf are causing—are assisting—these abnormal waves to form,” Arabonis said. The underwater canyons and irregular slopes snagged the swells, slowing parts of them down and causing pileups that were whipped to even meaner heights by an opposing wind, and by the head butting that went on between the current and the oncoming South Atlantic swells. If you set out in a lab to create the ideal environment for mutant waves, you couldn’t do any better. “The ocean’s a pretty wild place,” Arabonis said soberly. “A lot of ships do get lost. And if you consider the smaller boats, the numbers are extraordinary. I heard a statistic of several thousand yachts a year disappearing.” He stood to refill our cups of tea. “A wave that’s sixty feet from trough to crest is a very scary beast. But when it hits seventy-five feet you’re talking about something absolutely out of this world.”

  Both at the surface and below, it seems, everything is in constant flux. Energy flows and surges and occasionally bellows. Water itself is a most complex substance, eight hundred times denser than air, prone to confounding behavior. Wind is invisible but can wreak havoc wherever it goes. When it comes to making a wave, so many factors come into play that it is hard to know where any one thing ends and another begins, but in South Africa they measure their progress by the number of ships—and lives—they are able to save; the gallons of oil they prevent from hitting the drink, fouling the landscape. This is a full-time job.

  “Knowing what they do about this place, why do ships come here at all?” I asked.

  Arabonis let out a deep sigh, as though the question exasperated him. “The Suez Canal can handle only so many boats and only of a certain size,” he said. “We’re looking at thirty percent of the world’s shipping going past the cape here.” He swept his arm toward the window and beyond, to South Africa’s Wild Coast. “They’ve got no other choice!”

  The helicopter twisted off the ground at Cape Town International Airport, rising high above the Khayelitsha Township, a patchy sea of flat-roofed shacks and shanties that housed more than two million people, one of South Africa’s starkest physical reminders of apartheid’s cruel legacy. In the distance Table Mountain hunkered over the city, clouds swirling at its peak. We flew past Lion’s Head, circled, and hovered in the silvery dusk light, then we swung out over the ocean, flying fast and low across the water. Waves streamed in, endless, and in front of us the African coastline wound its way toward the Indian Ocean, toward the grounded ship in Mozambique and the sunken remains of so many others.

  I heard Sloane’s voice in my headset. “Look down,” he said, pointing to my window.

  Below us, lying hard on the rocks of a promontory, was the battered skeleton of a ship. It was busted and listing heavily, with its midsection caved in. A dented crane hung crookedly off its deck. “A Russian ship was towing it down from the Congo,” Sloane shouted, above the din of the rotors. “Lost it in a storm and it landed on the rocks. Fifty-foot seas. It was a hundred-million-dollar loss.”

  The helicopter dipped low so I could get a better look. The waves were hammering, and whitewater sprayed over the ship. I could see the patina of rust and decay, the proud insignia faded to shadow. When it was built the vessel had been stalwart and kingly; now it was lost to the elements. Sloane, Arabonis, Davies, and the other salvagers I’d spoken to here—they all expected a stormier future, more ships on the rocks. “The dynamics of the ocean are changing,” Arabonis said. “There’s more energy in all the systems.” But looking down at the ruined freighter, I realized that one thing remained the same: the waves always won.

  THAT WHICH IS, IS FAR OFF, AND DEEP, VERY DEEP. WHO CAN FIND IT OUT?

  Ecclesiastes 7:24

  HAIKU, MAUI

  Get your vest.”

  Hamilton’s voice cut in and out over the cell phone, and I could hear a roaring noise in the background, as though he were speaking from inside a wind tunnel. Those three words brought things into quick focus: “vest” meant flotation vest, which in turn meant big waves. Given that we were on Maui, big waves meant Jaws. “Get your vest” therefore was shorthand for “Jaws is breaking.” From the background sounds and Hamilton’s brusque tone, I knew he was either
calling from his truck, lead-footing it down the Hana Highway to launch from Ilima Kalama’s house, or he was out on the water already, racing up the coast on a Jet Ski.

  “Are you out there?” I asked, still foggy from sleep. It was just past dawn, and I could hear my neighbor’s rooster screeching in the background. A wash of apricot light played over the Pacific. From my bedroom window everything looked deceptively peaceful. “How is it? How big is the—?”

  He cut me off. “Just get down to Ilima’s. But you gotta move it. Forget the mascara.”

  I jumped out of bed and pulled on a bathing suit, wet suit, and rash guard, grabbed my vest, and ran from the house still brushing my teeth, almost stepping on my cat. If Jaws was performing today, I wasn’t going to miss it. Pulling out of my driveway, I noticed a handful of trucks and cars winding down Pe’ahi Road, a one-lane rut that snaked through ragged brush and neglected fields, dead-ending at a bluff above Jaws, two valleys away from Hamilton’s cliffside vantage point. Word was out: the waves were here. Within hours a hundred people would be gathered at the edge of the lookout.

  The swell, whatever size it was, came as a surprise to me. As recently as the previous day there had been no talk of exceptional waves showing up in the near future. There were no obvious magenta blobs advancing on Hawaii, no plans for Don Shearer and his helicopter to be on call. It wasn’t unusual, however, for Hamilton to sense that conditions were changing—and say nothing about it. To his mind, making pronouncements about the ocean’s future behavior was the ultimate arrogance. One of the fastest ways to aggravate him was to hold forth about what the waves would be doing next week, say, or later this season. “Tomorrow’s going to be great,” I made the mistake of saying one time, after looking at promising wave forecasts. “Oh, it is, is it?” he’d snapped in a sarcastic voice, turning on me with a hard look. “We don’t know that. Nobody knows that.” From this philosophy stemmed an aversion to making plans of any kind, a need for all options to remain open until the ocean actually showed its hand. “Forecasting’s a crapshoot. I wait until I see the whites of the eyes,” Hamilton said, describing how he judged what was, and was not, a worthy swell.